We get by on 25% productivity

It is quite interesting to find out how much time AT work we truly managed to spend ON work. This is not to say that there is anything terribly wrong with what an average person does. After all, work required still gets done.

Steve Pavlina (well, he is on the Net, so I can quote him), reckons that "Studies have shown that the average office worker does only 1.5 hours of actual work per day. The rest of the time is spent socializing, taking coffee breaks, eating, engaging in non-business communication, shuffling papers, and doing lots of other non-work tasks. The average full-time office worker doesn't even start doing real work until 11:00am and begins to wind down around 3:30pm."

Hmm, there is lunch in between, but let's just believe the studies.

Tomaz Mencinger thinks he is 25% productive. Read more at Pick The Brain.com. His day in question was:

"We can then divide our productive time by the total time available to calculate our productivity in percentage form.

For example, today I started work at 9:30 and I am finishing this article at around 11:30.

For this system to work, you need to be brutally honest. If I am, then in my two hours of available work, I spent around 40 minutes writing this post and about 20 minutes answering emails related to my business.

The other 60 minutes I spent time chatting with two friends on Skype, reading emails not related to my work , and reading internet marketing news not crucial to my business.

My productivity then was 60 minutes of work / 120 minutes of available time = 50%

When I do this again in the evening, I then realize that my daily productivity was maybe only 25%.

I have now measured my productivity and realized the painful truth: I spent only 25% of my available time working towards my goals and wasted the rest of my time doing unimportant things."

There are two take-aways from this short point:

(1) If there is a tool that actually allow the employer to get back say, an additional 5 minutes, for the employee to do actual work or to buy in more into the employer ethos, that would increase the productivity by 5.5%. Not bad ya.

(2) If a boss sees an employee busy in the office for more than 1.5 hours, be thankful, that's a net gain!